Rhonda had never felt more ready to help folks, once she had completed her program. She was rarin’ to go and had expected to be busy immediately. After all, look at how much she had invested in preparing herself to help. Rhonda got her license, printed up business cards, told all her friends, and ... waited, and then waited some more. She joined and spoke at the local business group, got her name and service listed in the local business directory, sponsored a local event, and ... waited some more. No matter what Rhonda did, she couldn’t seem to find any clients to serve. At first, she thought it was something about her. But then it hit her: was she even offering what anyone wanted or needed?
Fitting
Somewhere between your interests, abilities, hard-won knowledge, and hard-earned skill on the one hand, and the population of customers, clients, patients, students, or others whom you hope to serve on the other hand, is a point at which the two sides meet. That point is the gyroscope of your career. Your effective interactions with those whom your career skills serve is the hinge point, the fulcrum lever, or the pendulum on which your career swings. Whether and how well your career services fit with the needs and desires of those whom you serve is the engine that drives your career. You may have prepared spectacularly well for your career, but all the preparation in the world won’t help you if those whom you hope to serve aren’t interested in what you’re offering. You must not only know the demographic you wish to serve and the goods, services, and skills you want to offer them. You must also fit those offerings to meet their perceived needs.
Employers
If you can get a job in your career field, employed and paid by another, then fitting your skills and offers to the needs of the people whom you intend to serve is more immediately your employer’s problem than your problem. To an extent, you’re only along for that ride. Your employer is the one who must ensure that enough customers and clients are out there wanting the precise things that your employer offers. You get a paycheck whether those customers and clients show up or not. But only for a time. You’ll quickly learn two things in virtually any job: (1) the job ends when no one wants or needs it done; and (2) you’d better be doing the job just as its customers need it done, or your employer will quickly find another employee to replace you. Relatively few employees are immune from that process of continually fitting their service to the needs and desires of their customers. The first big adjustment new entrants in a field or profession must often make is to realize that the customer’s preference drives ninety percent of what they do. Adjust quickly, and keep adjusting throughout your career, or you’ll be finding a new career soon.
Objectives
The prior chapter urged you to research the markets for goods and services related to the career fields in which you have an interest and have or can acquire the qualifications. You’ve taken a big step once you identify the best market or markets where you might do well with the knowledge and skill you possess or can refine and acquire. But you still need to fit what you intend to offer to that market. A big gap exists between being, say, a physician, lawyer, administrator, manager, or consultant, and fitting the skills of those professions and roles to what those whom you hope to serve actually want to accomplish. To close that gap, you must think less for a moment about the product or service transaction and more about the customer or client objective. If you’re a lawyer, for instance, don’t think initially of the will or estate plan products you’re selling. See, instead, that your clients are trying to provide for their children in their absence. If instead you’re a physician, think less initially of the drug, therapy, or device you’ll order and more that your elderly patients are trying to maintain ten more years of mobility. Focus on objectives over products and services.
Fitness
When choosing and pursuing a career, you’ll need confidence that you can discern and satisfy the objectives of those whom you are serving. You need to know and respect what those whom you are serving are trying to accomplish, and have the commitment and sensitivity to help them do so. You may be perfectly happy to produce a good or sell a service. But to the client or customer, the goods or services aren’t the center of the transactions. Instead, meeting their objective is the transaction’s focus. Your basic goods or services may change only a little, perhaps only in the timing and manner of their delivery. But if you’re not willing and able to make those adjustments to ensure the fitness of your goods or services, then you’ve chosen the wrong career. The paint store, for instance, doesn’t just sell paint. Its owner specifies the particular paint to meet the customer’s need, then tints the paint to meet the customer’s color preference, then advises on the paint’s proper application, then shakes the paint and supplies the proper brushes or rollers. How willing and adept are you at fitting your goods and services to meet others’ objectives?
Quality
New entrants to fields may assume that their success in the field depends on their ability to offer higher quality goods or services. Yet that’s not necessarily so. Customers and clients don’t necessarily see quality as a single measure where higher quality is always better. Customers and clients may in many cases prefer a simpler, less expensive, even rudimentary good or service that meets their objective. Take, for example, an offer of funeral services. Funeral homes constantly adjust their service offerings to meet the preferences, expectations, and budgets of their family clients. Some memorials get every bell and whistle, while other memorials are swift and simple, and other memorials fall in between with some of the accoutrements of an elaborate service but not all of them. A better memorial isn’t necessarily one that has more bells and whistles. The memorial’s quality depends on the family client’s expectations and objectives. The family may believe, out of their own values or the legacy of the departed, that a simpler memorial honors the departed more than an elaborate memorial. Can you see yourself sensitively adjusting goods or services qualities in your career field?
Packaging
Packaging is one way to think of the above issues of adjusting your offerings of goods or services to those whom you expect to serve in your career field. Here, packaging doesn’t refer to the literal boxing and wrapping of goods. Rather, packaging refers to giving some sense of adaptable structure to your offerings. As soon as workers enter a new field, they realize the standard things that they’ll be doing, along with the common adjustments to those standard things. Whether you’re a cosmetologist, pastor, dental assistant, printer, chef, decorator, estate seller, or whatever else, you soon begin to come home from each day realizing that you did a certain amount of this and a certain number of that in your day, typical of other days. Packaging is a way to think of those standard things you do, recognizing that many transactions involve fine tuning the offering to meet customer or client needs, preferences, and objectives. Can you see yourself capable of and committed to making repeated goods or services offers with common adjustments in your career field?
Pricing
Sensitive pricing of the goods and services you offer through your career field is also a significant consideration in short-term and long-term career success. What you do must be affordable. Affordability, though, relates closely to value. The greater the value your goods or services provide, the more affordable their price may be, considering the return that your customers or clients get from them. Your success may also depend on the transparency of your pricing, whether your customers or clients can tell whether they can afford your goods or services. The timing of your price disclosure can also be critical to the success of your offering. Disclosing pricing too early, before consumers know features and value, can affect sales just as adversely as disclosing pricing too late, after consumers have given up on investigating your offer. Price options and choice can be equally important, whether in gold, silver, and bronze service levels or unbundled goods and services allowing cafeteria-style selection. And your accountability to pricing, ensuring that you provide what you promised at the cost to which you agreed, is equally important. Are you ready to address pricing issues in your chosen career field?
Delivery
Your ability and willingness to address goods and services delivery issues in your career can also affect your career success. Meeting consumer needs involves not just properly packaging and pricing your goods or services but also delivering those goods or services efficiently, in a manner that provides consumers with access to them. Here, delivery doesn’t refer to shipping goods. Delivery means getting your goods or services from you to the consumer in the location, at the time, by the means, or with the mobility that consumers request or require. Offering your goods or services in a downtown office from 9 to 5 Mondays to Fridays may work well for you but not at all for your customers or clients. Consumers can expect online, evening, weekend, remote video, and mobile services. They can welcome house calls for pet grooming, videoconferencing for counseling sessions, and online systems for tutoring services. Whether you can accommodate efficient and accessible delivery of goods and services in your chosen career is an important question.
Journal
Return to the Markets section of your Career Journal. Choose your one or two best markets related to your career field. List some key objectives that you believe individuals whom you expect to serve in that field would hope to accomplish through the goods or services you would provide them. Don’t just describe the goods or services. Instead, state the underlying objective the individuals would accomplish with the goods or services. Then project some adjustments you’d need to make in your offerings to fit the goods or services to the customers or clients, to meet their objectives. What quality considerations might you have to adjust? What packaging issues can you predict? What pricing issues could you foresee? And how might you need to adjust goods or services delivery? The exercise is to help you look more closely at the people whom you would serve through your career skills, to help you measure your readiness and commitment to serve them.
Key Points
You must be able to fit your career services to meet consumer needs.
Employers depend on employees capable of meeting consumer needs.
Think in terms of the objectives consumers are trying to accomplish.
Expect to adjust your career services to individual desires and needs.
Be ready to offer a range of quality in your career services.
Prepare to adjust your standard offerings to consumer preferences.
Be sensitive to price, price transparency, and pricing options.
Prepare to deliver consumer services in accessible and timely manner.